ARmy Rumour SErvice

Originally Posted by Chef

If I wanted to disrupt a city, wouldn't it be more reliable and cheaper to nick a Transit and plant a nuke and let it off? Far more newsworthy, even a conventional PE bomb spiked with radio active material is relatively easy to fabricate and deliver. I'd be more worried about the square mile being a no go zone for 100 years and visible for all and sundry to see as a reminder than an EMP which may or may not have the effects predicted.

Plus there's less chance of this

India satellite rocket explodes after take-off - YouTube

Or this

Failed V2 Rocket - YouTube

I do love watching these rocket mishaps. Some of them are freaking scary!

Wikipedia says:
The weaponeers became quite worried when three satellites in low earth orbit were disabled. These man-made radiation belts eventually crippled one-third of all satellites in low earth orbit. Seven satellites failed over the months following the test as radiation damaged their solar arrays or electronics, including the first commercial relay communication satellite, Telstar.[9][10] Detectors on Telstar, TRAAC, Injun, and Ariel 1 were used to measure distribution of the radiation produced by the tests.[11]

Well, the effect is real enough, and it's worth remembering that the electrical systems knocked out in the '60's used thermionic valves, discrete transistors and electromechanical relays in their control systems, not nano-scale IC chips. Looking at Wiki's artice on "Starfish" (Was it called that because it made them look like arseholes?) I reckon anything that could down electrical systems over a thousand mile radius is worth preparing for..

I know a former mate spent the '70's working for RACAL on hardening mlitary comms, but are there any proper engineers on here with relevant knowledge prepared to predict the effect on ? equipment like PC's in earthed metal cases? Hand-held kit like smartphones? Internet infrastructure?

Surely it's worth upping the specs of public infrastructure to protect them from an effect which, as been pointed out could equally well be caused by a natural solar event as naughtiness by a rogue state.

The committee chairman does not appear to have a financial interest in any hardware manufacturers, although he does have a prior financial interest in insurance brokers so there is arguably an angle for him here.

Quite a strong Israeli connection though... make of that what you will.

Iran are a long way from having ICBM that can be detonated in space. Realistically the only threat in this regard is the Russians.

The blast radius for thermonuclear weapons detonated at altitude (but not in space) is much larger and as has been pointed out the EMP radius too. The "downside" from a military point of view is that there is no nuclear winter and much of the harmful radiation dissipates into the atmosphere.

If anyone is really interested (or has a lot of time on their hands) in reading a proper assessment of effects of EMP on national infrastructures, read the report in the link below:

Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack - Critical National Infrastructures

Warning: It's a 7MB PDF report and is about 200 pages long.

p.s: Might be useful if your MPs used this as a starting point, not engage another consultancy using lots of taxpayers' £££ to do produce a "pre-liminary analysis", which would be pretty much exactly the same. Just a suggestion.


Useful links:

http://pages.uoregon.edu/joe/infraga...ugene-2009.pdf
http://www.afcea.org/signal/documents/LEA.pdf

Originally Posted by Pyianno

The committee chairman does not appear to have a financial interest in any hardware manufacturers, although he does have a prior financial interest in insurance brokers so there is arguably an angle for him here.

Quite a strong Israeli connection though... make of that what you will.

Iran are a long way from having ICBM that can be detonated in space. Realistically the only threat in this regard is the Russians.

The blast radius for thermonuclear weapons detonated at altitude (but not in space) is much larger and as has been pointed out the EMP radius too. The "downside" from a military point of view is that there is no nuclear winter and much of the harmful radiation dissipates into the atmosphere.

Well, in the interests of clarity .... If they are detonated such that the fireball does not touch the ground then the total fallout is roughly equivalent to what was inside the bomb, suitably modified by the blast. See Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the fallout was highly dispersed rather than creating radioactive no-go zones.

However, should the fireball touch the ground wholly or partially then whatever material that gets inside the fireball gets heavily irradiated. And that will result in a lot more fallout - ridiculous quantities more, if you read up on some of the old ground tests.

Modern weapons are designed to use the minimum mass of fissile material per bang, so fallout for air bursts will be even lower than for 1940s technology bombs. And if you want to kipper a city, the best bet is to use several smaller weapons as airbursts to spread the damage wide and set it on fire to let the firestorm do the real damage. It's the burning cities that drive nuclear winter, not the nukes themselves.

And here airburst isn't very high as these things go, I think the blasts during WW2 were both under 1000m in altitude. Starfish Prime was 400km high, by way of comparison.

The real worry during the Cold War as far as radioactive contamination went was the use of big ground bursts to destroy hardened ICBM silos and other hard targets. Then you would get some really ugly fallout plumes.

I explode my nuclear space bombs over the missus's atmosphere as often as possible, alas, never done any lasting damage to the slag.